by Ian Kershaw
But, once more looking to his own place in history, and looking to the reasons why the path of destiny had led to mounting tragedy for Germany, instead of glorious victory, he found a further reason, beyond the treachery of his generals: the weakness of the people. If Speer can be believed, Hitler gave at this time an intimation that the German people might not deserve him, might have proved weak, have failed its test before history, and thus be condemned to destruction.63 It was one of the few hints, whether in public or in private, amid the continued outpourings of optimism about the outcome of the war, that Hitler indeed contemplated, even momentarily, the possibility of total defeat.
Whatever the positive gloss he instinctively and insistently placed upon news of the latest setbacks as he continued to play the role of Führer to perfection, he was not devoid of understanding for the significance of the successful landing of the western Allies in Normandy, the dramatic collapse of the eastern front which left the Red Army in striking distance of the borders of the Reich itself, the ceaseless bombing that the Luftwaffe was powerless to prevent, the overwhelming Allied superiority in weaponry and raw materials, and gloomy reports of a mounting, critical fuel shortage. Kluge and Rommel had both urged Hitler to end the war which he could not win.64 But he continued to dismiss out of hand all talk of suing for peace. The situation was ‘not yet ripe for a political solution’, he declared. ‘To hope for a favourable political moment to do something during a time of severe military defeats is naturally childish and naïve,’ he went on, during the military briefing session with his generals on 31 August 1944. ‘Such moments can present themselves when you have successes.’ But where were the successes likely to materialize? All he could point to was a feeling of certainty that at some point the Allied coalition would break down under the weight of its inner tensions. It was a matter of waiting for that moment, however tough the situation was.
‘My task has been,’ he continued, ‘especially since 1941 under no circumstances to lose my nerve.’ He lived, he said, just to carry out this struggle since he knew that it could only be won through a will of iron. Instead of spreading this iron will, the General Staff officers had undermined it, disseminating nothing but pessimism. But the fight would continue, if necessary even on the Rhine. He once more evoked one of his great heroes of history. ‘We will under all circumstances carry on the struggle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned opponents is tired of fighting any longer, and until we get a peace which secures the existence of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years and’ – he was back at a central obsession – ‘which, above all, does not defile our honour a second time, as happened in 1918.’ This thought brought him directly to the bomb plot, and to his own survival. ‘Fate could have taken a different turn,’ he continued, adding with some pathos: ‘If my life had been ended, it would have been for me personally, I might say, only a liberation from worries, sleepless nights, and severe nervous strain. In a mere fraction of a second you’re freed from all that and have rest and your eternal peace. For the fact that I’m still alive, I nevertheless have to thank Providence.’65
They were somewhat rambling thoughts. But they were plain enough in meaning: a negotiated peace could not be considered except from a position of strength (which was in realistic terms unimaginable); the only hope was to hold out until the Allied coalition collapsed (but time, and the crass imbalance of material resources, were scarcely on Germany’s side); his historic role, as he saw it, was to eradicate any possibility of a second capitulation on the lines of that of November 1918; he alone stood between Germany and calamity; but suicide would bring release for him (whatever the consequences for the German people) within a split second. In Hitler’s extraordinary perspective, his historic task was to continue the fight to the point of utter destruction – and even self-destruction – in order to prevent another ‘November 1918’ and to erase the memory of that ‘disgrace’ for the nation. It was a task of infinitely greater honour than negotiating a peace from weakness – something which would bring new shame on himself and the German people. It amounted to scarcely less than a realization that the time for a last stand was approaching, and that no holds would be barred in a struggle likely to end in oblivion, where the only remaining monumental vision was the quest for historical greatness – even if Reich and people should go down in flames in the process.
This meant in turn that there was no way out. The failure of the conspiracy to remove Hitler took away the last opportunity of a negotiated end to the war. For the German people, it ensured the near total destruction of their country. Whatever the varied reactions to the events of 20 July and their aftermath, ordinary Germans were exposed over the next eight months to the laying waste of their cities in relentless bombing-raids against which there was as good as no defence, to the painful losses of loved ones fighting an obviously futile war against vastly superior enemy forces, to acute privations in the material conditions of their daily lives, and to intensified fear and repression at the hands of a regime that would stop at nothing. The horrors of a war which Germany had inflicted on the rest of Europe were rebounding – if, even now, in far milder form – on to the Reich itself. With internal resistance crushed, and a leadership unable to bring victory, incapable of staving off defeat, and unwilling to attempt to find peace, only total military destruction could bring a release.
For Hitler’s countless victims throughout Europe, the advances, impressive though they had been, of the Red Army in the east and the Anglo-American forces in the west and the south, were not yet nearly at the point where they could force an end to the war, and with it the immeasurable suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime. The human misery had, in fact, still not reached its peak. It would rise in crescendo in the months still to come.
II
Those who had risked their lives in the plot to assassinate Hitler were fully aware that they were acting without the masses behind them.66 In the event of a successful coup, the conspirators had to hope that a rapid end to the war would win over the vast majority of the population – most of whom had at one time been admirers of Hitler – and that the emergence of a new ‘stab-in-the-back-legend’ (such as had poisoned German politics after the First World War) could be avoided.67 If they were to fail, the plotters knew they would not have a shred of popular support, that their act would be seen as one of base treachery, and that they could expect to be regarded with nothing but outright ignominy by the mass of the population.
The Nazi leadership was, however, leaving nothing to chance. One Gauleiter, Siegfried Uiberreither, the Nazi leader in Styria, inquired within hours of Stauffenberg’s bomb exploding whether public displays of support for Hitler were envisaged. He was told that ‘loyalty rallies’ were welcomed, and that, in the light of his request, instructions would soon be transmitted to all Gauleiter. These were sent the next day, encouraging huge open-air mass rallies ‘in which the joy and satisfaction of the people at the wonderful salvation of the Führer’ would be expressed.68 Such rallies took place over the following days in towns and cities throughout Germany. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens and Wehrmacht representatives ‘spontaneously’ gave voice to their shock and outrage at the ‘foul attempt on the Führer’s life (das ruchlose Attentat gegen den Führer)’ and their relief and happiness that he had survived it.69
The sentiments were identical to those recorded in early soundings of opinion taken by the SD and passed on by the Chief of the Security Police Ernst Kaltenbrunner to Martin Bormann after the news of the assassination attempt had spread like wildfire. A first report, compiled on 21 July, announced uniform reactions throughout the German people of ‘strongest consternation, shock, deep outrage, and fury’. Even, it was claimed, in districts or among sections of the population known to be critical of Nazism, such sentiments could be registered; not a single comment hinted at sympathy for the planned assassination. In some cities, women were said to have burst into tears in shops or on the streets when they heard what
had happened. A remark commonly heard was: ‘Thank God the Führer is alive.’ Many were prepared to accept Hitler’s own version in seeing his survival as a sign of Providence and an indication that, despite all setbacks, the war would end in victory. Very many people, the report added, connected ‘mystical, religious notions with the person of the Führer’.70
People initially jumped to the conclusion that enemy agents were behind the assassination attempt – an assumption that triggered a new upsurge of hatred against the British.71 After Hitler’s speech – held so late at night that most people were already in bed, but repeated in the early afternoon of 21 July – the fury turned against those seen as traitors within. There was outrage that the attempt on the Führer’s life had been carried out by officers of the Wehrmacht, something viewed (as Hitler himself saw it) as the treachery behind Germany’s military disasters.72 Full expectations of a ruthless ‘cleansing’ of the officer corps were placed in the ‘strong man’ Heinrich Himmler. Approving comments of Stalin’s purges could be heard. And a speech by Robert Ley violently denouncing the aristocracy gave rise to widespread castigation of the ‘high-ups’, ‘big noises’, and ‘monocle-chaps’. There was resentment that the burdens of ‘total war’ had not been spread evenly; that too many people had been able to avoid them. Such people needed to be forced into line, however tough the measures were to bring this about. Whatever sacrifices were needed to bring the war to a speedy and victorious end would then be willingly borne.73
The failure of the bomb-plot revived strong support for Hitler not only within Germany, but also among soldiers at the front. There was, for instance, a rise in expressions of faith in Hitler among prisoners-of-war captured by the western Allies in Normandy in late July.74 And the military censor who had examined 45,000 letters of ordinary soldiers from the front in August 1944 commented on ‘the high number of joyful expressions about the salvation of the Führer’.75 There was no compulsion in letters back home even to refer to the attempt on Hitler’s life. The pro-Hitler sentiment was doubtless genuine.
Four days after Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded, the SD reports still stressed the almost unanimous condemnation of the assassination attempt and the joy at the Führer’s survival. There was now, however, a hint of other voices. ‘Only in absolutely isolated cases,’ it was said, ‘was the attack not sharply condemned.’ A woman in Halle had been arrested for expressing regret at the outcome of the bomb-attack. Another woman in Vienna had remarked that something like that was bound to happen because the war was lasting so long. But – so the SD claimed – even ‘politically indifferent’ sectors of the population reacted heatedly against such comments.76
The backlash of support for Hitler and ferocity of condemnation of those who had tried to kill the Führer, as mirrored in the SD’s reports, had, as we have noted, been fully anticipated by the plotters themselves in the event of their failure. It highlighted the extensive reservoir of Hitler’s popularity that still existed and could be tapped to bolster the regime at a critical time, despite the increasingly self-evident catastrophic course of the war. The Führer cult was far from extinguished.
But Hitler’s popularity, as we have seen, had unquestionably waned over the previous two years. He had personally been drawn increasingly into the blame for the miseries of a war almost certain to end in defeat. It is hard to imagine, therefore, that the unanimity of feelings of joy at his survival recorded by the SD could have been an accurate reflection of the views of the German people as a whole. The SD was unquestionably registering widely expressed opinion, indeed indicating a real upsurge in pro-Hitler feeling. But the opinions the SD’s informants were able to hear would doubtless have been those emanating in the main from regime-loyalists, Nazi fanatics, and those anxious to demonstrate their support or dispel any suspicions that they might be critical of Hitler. People with less positive views were well advised to keep them to themselves – at such a critical juncture quite especially.77 As war-fortunes had worsened, punishment for incautious remarks had become more draconian. Expressing out loud in late July 1944 regret that Hitler was still alive was as good as suicidal. Some people did take risks. A Berlin tram conductor ventured a brief but pointed commentary on Goebbels’s radio address on 26 July, in which the Propaganda Minister had castigated the plotters. ‘It makes you want to throw up,’ the tram conductor remarked.78 He seems to have got away with it.
Critical sentiments could be expressed safely, however, only in privacy, or among trusted family or friends. One boy, for instance, just sixteen at the time, confided on 21 July 1944 in the remarkable diary that he kept in the attic of a house near Hamburg: ‘Assassination attempt on Hitler! Yesterday, an attack on Hitler with explosives was carried out in his study. Unfortunately, as if by a miracle the swine was unharmed… Last night at 1a.m. Hitler gave a speech on the radio. It’s very noticeable that Hitler repeated six times that it’s only a matter of “a tiny clique”. But his extensive measures give the lie to these claims. You don’t need to put in an entire army to wipe out “a tiny cabal”.’79 The boy kept the diary to himself, not even showing it to his parents.
Another diary entry, from a one-time Hitler-loyalist whose former enthusiasm had turned cold, confined itself to the cynically ambiguous comment: ‘Assassination attempt on the Führer. “Providence” has saved him, and therefore we can believe in victory.’80 Letters to loved ones were also best ‘coded’ for safety. One well-educated German, for years a strong critic of Nazism, writing on 21 July from Paris to his Canadian wife in Germany, remarked about the events of the previous day: ‘For some people it can hardly have been a good night, but we must be thankful that the affair ended as it did. For this war, as I have always pointed out, can only be brought to the desired conclusion by Adolf Hitler!’81
Signs that there were voices beyond the unanimous condemnation summarized by the SD, and that the silence of a large majority of the population was evocative, could even be found in official reports from provincial localities. One such report from Upper Bavaria frankly admitted that ‘part of the population would have welcomed the success of the assassination attempt because in the first instance they would have hoped for an earlier end to the war from it’.82 Another report relayed the perilous remark uttered by a woman, hidden in the gloom in the corner of a dark air-raid shelter: ‘If only they’d have got him.’83
At the front, too, opinion about the bomb-plot was more divided than appearances suggested. Implying any regret that Hitler had survived was to court disaster. Letters home had to pass through the control of the censor and might be intercepted. It was safest to keep quiet. So it is remarkable that there was even a slight increase in criticism of the regime in August 1944, and even more telling that some letters risked extreme retribution for the sender. One soldier was lucky. His letter home on 4 August escaped the attention of the censor. It ran: ‘You write in your letter of the attack on the Führer. Yes, we heard of it even on the same day. Unfortunately, the gents had bad luck. Otherwise there’d already be a truce, and we’d be saved from this mess.’84 In other instances, the censor picked up similar bold comments. The death-sentence for the writer of the letter was then an almost certain consequence.85
As the reactions to the bomb-plot revealed, the bonds of the German people to Hitler, if greatly loosened, were far from broken in mid-1944. The failure of Stauffenberg’s attempt had prompted an outpouring of support for Hitler which unquestionably strengthened the regime for a time. The feeling that to attempt to kill the head of state, and at a time when the nation was fighting for its very existence, was a heinous crime was far from confined to Nazi fanatics. The Catholic sector of the population, for instance, recognized for its lukewarm backing for a regime which since its inception had conducted its attritional campaign against the Church, was also prominently represented in the huge demonstrations of loyalty to Hitler in late July.86 Both major denominations – important formative influences on opinion – condemned the attempt to kill Hitler even after the wa
r.87 And as late as the early 1950s, a third of those questioned in opinion surveys still criticized the attack on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944.88 But above all, the voices captured by the SD in the first days after the assassination attempt were those of the dwindling masses of continued loyal believers in the Führer. They had spoken loudly for the last time. What proportion of the population (or even of a Nazi Party with a nominal membership by this time of over 8 million Germans)89 they represented can only be guessed at; but they constituted by now almost certainly a minority – if still a controlling minority with massive repressive capacity.
Even some of the SD’s own provincial stations were providing, within weeks of the explosion in the Wolf’s Lair, blunt indicators of the collapse in Hitler’s popularity. A devastating report on 8 August from the SD office in Stuttgart, for instance, began by stating that for the overwhelming majority of the population in that area it was not a question of whether Germany would win the war, but only whether they would be ruled by the Anglo-Americans or Russians. Beyond a small number of Party activists and a tiny section of the population, no one thought there would be a miracle. People read into Hitler’s speech on the night after Stauffenberg’s bomb-attack the exact opposite of what was intended. It was now plain, they said, that Göring, Goebbels, and other leading men in the regime had lied to them in claiming that time was on Germany’s side, armaments production was rising, and the day of a return to the offensive backed by new, decisive weapons was close at hand. They had now heard in the Führer’s own words that his work had been sabotaged for years. In other words, people were saying: ‘The Führer is admitting that time has previously not been on our side, but running against us. If such a man as the Führer has been so thoroughly deceived,’ the summary of prevailing opinion continued, ‘then he is either not the genius that he has been depicted as, or, knowing that saboteurs were at work, he intentionally lied to the German people, which would be just as bad, for, with such enemies within, war-production could never have been raised, and we could never gain victory.’ The consequence of such thoughts was made explicit: ‘The most worrying aspect of the whole thing is probably that most comrades of the people, even those who up to now have believed unshakeably, have lost all faith in the Führer.’90